Another recent movie poster announcement.  Below are a few things that were done to it.

• Extended the dark background: I got really good results from the content-aware fill in this case.  The trick here was to (really loosely) select around the baby, just with the lasso tool, in about 8 seconds, and then make a layer mask for the layer, making the baby area be black in the mask.  So with the baby “gone” from the layer, content-aware fill doesn’t take those pixels into account.  I was impressed how it was able to continue the nice gradient in pretty much the right places.  It’s hard to make a nice gradient with the clone tool.  Then after the extending was done, I just removed that layer mask, turning the baby back on.
• Fadeout: I like when there can be a natural place to transition between an image and a poster background color.  The elbow sticking down seemed like a good element for this. So I made a gradient in the mask for the image the went across the whole image, and then painted white back in where the elbow (and its shadow) hangs down.  A little bit of extension was also needed on the baby’s abdomen, from rotating the image diagonally.

Those are pretty much the interesting photo manipulations that were done.  Be sure to check out the gallery with a little higher resolution on our gallery page.

Here’s a movie poster announcement we did recently.

There’s not too much to bring up here, but the 2 main things that were done were:

• Fade out the top and bottom of the picture.  We almost always have to either fade things out somewhere, or extend the image to fill the poster.  In this case, the pattern wasn’t going to be really easy to extend, so fading out seemed like the better option, and makes it so you can read the top tagline better as well.
• Did some skin smoothing and tried to remove/minimize the glare in some areas.  When skin is a little oily (like mine is usually) it will produce shiny highlights, especially if the on-camera flash is used.  To lessen that effect, I painted over those areas with a color that was next to the highlight, in “darken” mode, so it only affects colors that are brighter than it.  And even then, I usually paint it on a separate layer at full intensity, and then back it off to 70% or so.

This movie poster announcement was a little more unique in that it used a more natural background, and had less of a fade-out at the bottom because the original image took up more of the poster.  Since the background made sense with the movie title and theme, it made sense to leave it there.  There’s also a prop (the big baseball) which made it fun but also challenging.  See below for some of the work done.

• Since the very bottom of the image didn’t really help the image any, and would just be distracting behind the text, I faded it out to a color similar to the brown blanket.
• I also tried to get rid of slightly distracting things in the background, like the top left area, and the brown patches in the grass on the left, by using the clone tool.  Most of the image extension on the left and top was done with the new Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop CS5.  Very handy.
• I darkened the edges of the background, leaving a little bit of a glow effect around the baby, by using a Levels Adjustment layer in multiply mode and painting into the mask.

See if you can spot any other differences, and let me know in the comments section.

If you’re at that stage of getting ready to take a picture of your baby for a Nouncement (or just to have fun pictures) you should definitely take a look at these blog posts.  They have some great ideas of poses, accessories, backgrounds, etc.  They may be written with the baby photographer in mind, but are applicable to anyone who wants to take a picture of their baby, and are also great if you plan on having pictures taken by someone else, to give you ideas of things to ask for.  I wouldn’t have ever thought of putting a space heater close by, since the baby might not be wearing much, for example.

There are 2 parts to this one:

The Newborn Session

Newborn Photography Poses

And there is one especially for Baby Photographers:

Preparing for a Newborn Photography Session

Here is a post about a photo that got incorporated into one of our baby announcements:

Baby Photo Shoot

The best baby announcement designs generally come from the best baby pictures – there is a very strong correlation, so it’s worth planning out your pictures ahead of time as opposed to just taking a snapshot on the spur of the moment.  Even if you’re not photographing your baby right now, there are some adorable pictures to look at!

This is a variation title of some that we’ve done in the past.  Now we have “Newborn Identity” and “Just Born Identity” that have been done.

• One of the most obvious things that was done was to rotate the image (as you can see by the diagonal edge on the left image) to work better for our composition.
• Next obvious is painting the background blue.  There wasn’t any really intricate masking here.  Just a layer painted with varying amounts of blue, in color mode.  So some of the edge hair may technically be more blue than it should be, but it wasn’t noticeable enough to worry about it.  I tried to get the general feeling that there is more light on the background right around the baby than farther away.  It just adds more focus to the subject that way.
• Then there was some dodging and burning of the skin.  Mostly brightening it up, but keeping some of the sides that aren’t facing camera a little darker to keep some shape.